Böcker av Peter Wolfe

Similarly to Bach's cycle The Well-tempered Clavier or to Chopin's 24 Preludes, and similarly to his own collection published in 2019, the Wolf-temperiertes Klavier, Peter Wolf penned 24 piano pieces again. His Jazz Preludes set examples for improvisation and make use of the entire stylistic spectrum of jazz, ranging from the gospel (Anthem, No. 7) to blues (Windlass, No. 1), bebop (Crime, No. 11), Latin jazz (Tropical Night, No. 6), and, of course, the world of ballads (Nostalgia, No. 4 and Question Without Answer, No. 16). The individual movements are no mere style exercises or piano technique exercises but, like Debussy's preludes, they are expressive character pieces: musical images of a phenomenon, an emotion, a behavior pattern, a personal experience reflected by their titles.

The theatrical world Terence Rattigan built is vital but disturbing and uniquely constructed. His sentences are not impacted or fractured, and his plots usually obey a linear time sequence. Yet his realism isnt all that real. Though sentence by sentence, his dialogue sounds natural, the creative pulse behind it is idiosyncratic and self-lacerating. As a gay man writing at a time when homosexuality was a felony in the UK, Rattigan wrote at a skewed angle to his culture, making his plays at times easy to follow but hard to fathom. Terence Rattigan: The Playwright as Battlefield examines the ways in which Rattigan's works turn their audiences into participants, encouraging intellectual independence and freeing them to make decisions for themselves as to the deeper meanings of the works. The playwright's omission of outright explanations deepens the audience's emotional commitment to the outcomes of the performance, and walks a fine line between restraint and invention. His works convey subtly and deceptively the cold obstinacy that thwarts our everyday actions in a way which that is felt viscerally by the audience. This book engages works from throughout Rattigan's early and late career to examine the unique methods by which the playwright conveys meaning to various audiences within an ever-changing sociocultural context.

By mid-career, many successful writers have found a groove and their readers come to expect a familiar consistency and fidelity. Not so with Henry Green (1905-1973). He prefers uncertainty over reason and fragmentation over cohesion, and rarely lets the reader settle into a nice cozy read. Evil, he suggests, can be as instructive as good. Through Green''s use of paradoxical and ambiguous language, his novels bring texture to the flatness of life, making the world seem bigger and closer. We soon stop worrying about what Hitler''s bombs have in store for the Londoners of Caught (1943) and Back (1946) and start thinking about what they have in store for each other. Praised in his lifetime as England''s top fiction author, Green is largely overlooked today. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of his work for a new generation of readers.

Peter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald characterizes her work as having unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, he explains how shet brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to her writing.

James Ellroy's prose, in many ways as complex as any in the Western literary canon, strung together sensational stories of crime and catastrophe. The significance of his writing to Western culture has yet to be fully explored. Author Peter Wolfe offers us the first book-length study of Ellroy in English.

Havoc in the Hub examines the long-neglected work of George V. Higgins, bringing to light the wealth of intellectual, social, literary, and religious thought that underlie his 25 novels and numerous other writings.